À l’attaque! (2000) - film review

Two writers struggle to hammer out a script for their next film, attempting to combine the themes of popular romantic comedy with hard-edged social issues and political concerns.   After a few false starts, and surreal digressions, the film begins to take shape.  It concerns the Moliterno family who run a garage in the Estaque region of Marseilles.   When a company they do business with refuses to pay them because of insolvency problems, the family fall behind with their loan repayments.  After their bank issues a final demand, the Moliterno’s resort to desperate measures, kidnapping the managing director of the company who ruined them...

With such films as Marius et Jeannette (1997) and À la place du coeur (1998), Robert Guédiguian distinguished himself as a very capable film director with a particular talent for portraying the hard lives of working class people with a striking sunny realism.   In À l’attaque!, he stays with the same theme but pushes the film squarely into the domain of comedy, and the result is very nearly a cruel caricature of his own work.

À l’attaque! is less a social drama (in the same vein as Guédiguian’s earlier films) but more a satire on the art of writing a film.  It contains a film within a film, that film (set in Marseilles and starring the director’s familiar cast) being just recognisable as something Guédiguian may have come up with on a bad day.  The idea is unusual and works to some extent, although the continual switching between the fictional drama and the two arguing writers does make it difficult for an audience to engage with the characters in the former.

Although it lacks the impact and focus of Guédiguian’s better films (notably Marius et Jeannette), À l’attaque! has its charms.  Ariane Ascaride is, as ever, engaging in her role of the film’s tragic heroine, her credible, naturalistic performance being the main thing which prevents the film from descending into offensive silliness.  Apart from a few faux pas (such as the limp repartee between the two writers and an over-abundance of embarrasingly bad sex jokes), the comedy is generally well-handled and, at the very least, the film makes an uplifting and diverting piece of entertainment.

© James Travers 2002

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